Word: platypus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Harvard sent an expedition to Australia in 1931-32 and on February 27, 1932, in Dorrigo, New South Wales, the group trapped one fine dark-furred platypus. He--for it is a he, as he has poison spurs on his back legs--now rests in taxidermic peace, beneath the stupor of paradiethylchloride, with 12 of his fellows in the bottom rack of a huge case of monotremes and marsupials on the fifth floor. It is an austerely bolted cabinet, anciently designed to preserve the skins mechanically if not chemically. The skins lie on great wooden beds that slide out with...
Rutzmoser says that no one really looks at the platypus skins. After all, she explains, the taxonomy, or classification, of the creature is no longer a mystery, and students are usually more interested in the bones, which are closeted non-hermetically in another end of the room...
Pamela Cook, a post-doc at Harvard, introduced Temple-Smith to the informal audience of 20 by calling the platypus a zoologist's "favorite animal of all animals," and Temple-Smith himself allowed that the platypus is "weird". Not nearly enough study has been done on the platypus, he said, largely because it is so difficult to keep in captivity. The biggest work on the animal is a troglodytic volume produced forty years ago by Harry Burrell, and it is an elementary natural history of the platypus. Temple-Smith's own work has been done on the streams and backwaters...
...platypus, says Temple-Smith, is a very "solitary" animal. Each creature maintains its own burrow and forages for the sea-bottom mollusks and crustaceans that are its diet. When the female releases her young from the burrow, they don't, apparently, return but continue alone. Furthermore, the creature is nocturnal...
...platypus has adapted to its environment through a minor evolution of specializations. Its powerful claws allow it to dig its burrow; its thick fur allows it to maintain an aquatic existence; its musculature allows it to scramble over land, paddle through water, and close its eyes while underwater; and its extremely sensitive bill allows it to find food below the surface. Temple-Smith says, "When we were rowing about at night, the sound of the paddles would attract the animals...